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'Is' to 'Was': Coordination and Commemoration in Posthumous Activity on Wikipedia Biographies

Authors:

Brian C. Keegan,

Jed R. BrubakerAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

Pages 533 - 546

https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675238

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Following the deaths of notable people, Wikipedians incorporate this new knowledge by updating or creating biographical articles. Drawing on literature from death studies and peer production, we demonstrate how the creation of these "wiki-bituaries" requires complex coordination work and highlight processes of commemoration and memorialization within socio-technical systems. Using the corpus of 6,132 articles about people who died in 2012, we examine the network relationships and contribution dynamics of users who perform this work and identify behavioral and content dynamics on the biographical articles about the deceased. The collaborations that emerge from posthumous editing of these biographies are sites of significant activity that coalesce into complex but temporary collaborations. Based on these findings, we argue that Wikipedia has re-imagined the obituary into a genre for creating memory spaces in which the death of a subject prompts a form of "death work" involving the collective re-evaluation of article content and a transition into a new mode of data stewardship.

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Cited By

Dinneen JKrtalić MDavoudi NHellmich HOchsner CBressel P(2023)Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information managementJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24861Online publication date: 28-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24861
Turki HHadj Taieb MShafee TLubiana TJemielniak DAouicha MLabra Gayo JYoungstrom EBanat MDas DMietchen Don behalf of WikiProject COVID- (2022)Representing COVID-19 information in collaborative knowledge graphs: The case of WikidataSemantic Web10.3233/SW-21044413:2(233-264)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-210444
Abián DMeroño-Peñuela ASimperl E(2022)An Analysis of Content Gaps Versus User Needs in the Wikidata Knowledge GraphThe Semantic Web – ISWC 202210.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21(354-374)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

'Is' to 'Was': Coordination and Commemoration in Posthumous Activity on Wikipedia Biographies
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
2. Social and professional topics

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cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

February 2015

1956 pages

ISBN:9781450329224

DOI:10.1145/2675133

General Chairs:
Dan Cosley
Cornell University, USA
,
Andrea Forte
Drexel University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Luigina Ciolfi
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
,
David McDonald
University of Washington, USA

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 28 February 2015

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CSCW '15: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

March 14 - 18, 2015

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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CSCW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Dinneen JKrtalić MDavoudi NHellmich HOchsner CBressel P(2023)Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information managementJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24861Online publication date: 28-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24861
Turki HHadj Taieb MShafee TLubiana TJemielniak DAouicha MLabra Gayo JYoungstrom EBanat MDas DMietchen Don behalf of WikiProject COVID- (2022)Representing COVID-19 information in collaborative knowledge graphs: The case of WikidataSemantic Web10.3233/SW-21044413:2(233-264)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-210444
Abián DMeroño-Peñuela ASimperl E(2022)An Analysis of Content Gaps Versus User Needs in the Wikidata Knowledge GraphThe Semantic Web – ISWC 202210.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21(354-374)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21
West RLeskovec JPotts C(2021)Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social mediaProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences10.1073/pnas.2106152118118:38Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106152118
Öhman C(2019)From Bones to Bytes: A New Chapter in the History of DeathThe 2018 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab10.1007/978-3-030-17152-0_11(167-182)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17152-0_11
Zhang JTan CLv Q(2018)"This is why we play"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32744662:CSCW(1-25)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274466
Lazer DRadford J(2017)Data ex Machina: Introduction to Big DataAnnual Review of Sociology10.1146/annurev-soc-060116-05345743:1(19-39)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-060116-053457
Gach KFiesler CBrubaker J(2017)“Control your emotions, Potter”Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31346821:CSCW(1-18)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3134682
Twyman MKeegan BShaw ALee CPoltrock SBarkhuus LBorges MKellogg W(2017)Black Lives Matter in WikipediaProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998232(1400-1412)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2998181.2998232
Johnson ILin YLi THall AHalfaker ASchöning JHecht BKaye JDruin ALampe CMorris DHourcade J(2016)Not at Home on the RangeProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858123(13-25)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858123

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